In the networking communication world, IoT/M2M communication terminals have become an important form of networking applications. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a scenario in which objects, animals or people have the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction or M2M communication. A thing, in the Internet of Things, can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a wireless security camera installed on the corner of the street, an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network.
The challenge faced with respect to IoT/M2M communication is robust and secure transmission of data because leaking of such data can profoundly impact our security, health, environment and finances.
The conventional security solutions for communication, like public key cryptosystem, Transport layer security scheme and IP layer security, are costly in terms of the processing power, energy and bandwidth requirement where the ‘things’ in IoT are small devices with limited processing power and battery storage.
Although there are lightweight application-layer protocols like CoAP which is used in resource-constrained devices for transferring data over the Web, it does not have any inherent security capability. Therefore, to achieve a secure communication, CoAP mandates the use of DTLS. DTLS has several configurations where the maximum resource consuming variation uses certificate based authentication using public key infrastructure, whereas the minimum resource consuming variant of DTLS is a Pre-shared-key (PSK) mode. These variations/configurations provide end-point authentication. But, the exchanges required for such authentication establishment are not very lightweight.
Thus, there exists a need for a system that securely transmits data for constrained devices and utilizes less processing resources, bandwidth, and power, and increases throughput.